


The Unshakeable Facts of the Universe

by BreezySkye



Category: Supernatural
Genre: And then you can have schmoopy shippy things, Character Death Fix, Give it a few chapters, I don't have a lot of tags for this yet, Let Gabe cope with being alive, M/M, Sabriel happens eventually, the title of this fic is subject to change without warning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-16 01:18:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1326364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BreezySkye/pseuds/BreezySkye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gabe was dead. And then he wasn't. And this summary will get better when I write the next chapter, I promise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unshakeable Facts of the Universe

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! I seriously started writing this two hours ago. I don't know where I'm going with it, other than ridiculous amounts of schmoopy Sabriel towards the end. If Sabriel ain't your gig, you should probably avoid this. Or read it, if you want! That's cool too. I'll probably warn ya'll when Sabriel starts becoming a thing in this.
> 
> Death fix, obviously. AU Around the end of season 8/beginning of season 9.
> 
> Hope you like it! Feedback is welcome and encouraged. I don't have a beta, so all the mistakes are my own. Feel free to point out all of those mistakes. Really, it helps.

There was one thing that all angels knew as a fact.

Well, there were a lot of things that all of the angels knew as a fact. Heaven was good, Hell was not, Dad was gone and the sky was blue. (Those facts were kind of shaky nowadays though, what with the apocalypse and everything).  But one of the unshakeable, core facts of the universe was—well, that when angels died, they ceased to exist.

Apparently, Gabriel was the exception.

Kind of. Maybe. He was conscious. And breathing. He wasn’t entirely certain if that constituted aliveness, though.

Gabriel remembered dying. He remembered it with painful clarity, actually, seeing as your own death is generally something one doesn’t tend to easily forget. He remembered Lucifer, and his stupid attempt at valiance, and then he’d felt himself tear apart from the inside out in a shower of light and sparks and imminent doom.

So yeah. He had been dead. There was another one of those unshakeable, core facts of the universe.

Another fact: he was breathing. The air smelled like dust and dirt and musty old things, like your grandmother’s house when she dies and nobody feels like cleaning the place up, so it just sits there to rot and feed fungus and small, furry creatures.

It was not a pleasant smell.

He groaned in complaint at the hard ground under his back, and his voice echoed back to him—feeble and weak.  Just to spite the noise, he groaned louder.

Something clanged somewhere near, and Gabriel distantly heard a quiet string of cuss words. Normally he’d sit up and look around to try to figure out why he had been un-deaded, but his body felt heavy and his eyes felt sticky and nothing really wanted to cooperate with him, so he yielded to the impulse to lay there, immobile, and accept the fact that he was probably going to die another time without even getting to enjoy his second chance at life. Because, hey, when was life ever fair?

Cautious footsteps neared him, and didn’t stop until he could feel the faint vibration of them in the floor. The dead smell of the room changed slightly, to encompass the scent of leather, cheap alcohol, and laundry detergent. It wasn’t really an improvement.

“Um, hello?” An unfamiliar voice asked carefully. “Are you, uh, alive?”

Probably not, seeing as he couldn’t really move. Moving was an important part of being alive, right?

“Um. Um, okay, then, I’ll just—“

Gabriel made an irritated noise in the back of his throat. This guy was being annoying. Couldn’t he just go back to nonexistence? It smelled better.

“Oh!” The stranger moved closer, and so did the cloud of generic unwashed human odor. “Can you move?”

If he could move, he would have already, don’t you think? Gabriel made another irritated noise, belligerent and low, and mentally flipped this guy the bird. Idiot.

“Right! Um…” The guy trailed off, and Gabriel heard his knee crack as he bent down. Now the stranger was presumably crouched over him, and his breath smelled like the cheap kind of whiskey that shows up out of nowhere at frat parties. “Don’t be scared, I’m not going to hurt you.”

If Gabriel could, he would have tensed up at that. When people tell you to not be scared, your first reaction should be fear. Especially if you can’t move, or open your eyes, and have no clue whatsofreakingever where you are. Then it should be fucking _terror_. He made a questioning noise, and his voice cracked in an embarrassing way.

“Just go back to sleep.” The stranger advised.

Gabriel felt the warm press of fingers to his forehead, and then he was falling backwards, fading, and the stranger was saying something else but Gabriel couldn’t hear him because he was just _floating_.

 

* * *

 

 

“Good morning!” A chipper female voice crowed—way, way too overenthusiastically for it to _actually_ be morning.

Gabriel groaned in reply.

“Now that’s no way to start the day!” He could literally hear the frown in her syrupy voice. He liked sweet things, yeah, but not _that_ sweet.

His hand was automatically raised in the one-finger salute before he consciously registered the motion. The woman huffed in annoyance, and Gabriel opened his eyes.

And that would explain the dusty smell.

A shaft of light—coming from where, he didn’t know—did a wonderful job of illuminating every single swirling dust mote that was currently spinning above his head. He inhaled, and they spun down dizzyingly fast.

When Gabriel started coughing—huge, racking coughs that grated in his throat and stuck behind his chest—he heard the woman practically _bounce_ off, yelling in a painfully high voice for someone to bring water. Her voice and his coughing was definitely not helping the impending migraine he could feel just beginning to start behind his eyes.

Wait— _migraine_? That was stupid. Angels didn’t get migraines. Or cough. Or need to breathe. Or feel sore, which is what every single part of Gabriel felt right now, laying on the hard ground. Those were a few more of those unshakeable, cosmic facts of the universe—and again, more and more of those seemed to be changing.

Deciding to solve one problem at a time, Gabriel sat up. And then immediately sank back down, because yup, that was indeed a migraine he’d felt coming on, and sitting up made his head swim.

So instead, he consoled himself with laying on the floor and staring up at the dust motes, flying around in a panic above him.

His vision swam and the motes blurred, and he blinked. Blinking remedied the problem.

Huh. That was new too.

Gabriel was blinking rapidly at the ceiling by the time he heard footsteps again, a pair of them this time—one was obviously the woman’s, bouncy and clicky and generally annoying. The other was slower and heavier, and was accompanied with the smell of booze and leather.

Oh, the idiot stranger again. Great. Ditzy and Weirdo. Resurrection wasn’t as cool as he’d originally pegged it to be.  Couldn’t he just be dead again? Assuming he was alive, anyways.

“You’re alive.” Weirdo assured him.

“Geddouddamuhhead.” Gabriel slurred, slowly dragging his eyes away from the dust motes. It was a laborious task, but eventually he managed to get his gaze focused on the pair of strangers next to him.

They were standing in front of a doorway, the room behind them brightly lit. The room Gabriel was in was fairly dim in comparison, and the light hurt his eyes. Comparatively, the people were pretty much like the two rooms. Ditzy was wearing an alarming amount of pink and bad fashion sense, and beaming wide enough that—unless her face was made out of rubber—it _had_ to hurt. The man was slouched over and wearing a bathrobe over some clothes that looked like they hadn’t been washed in days. Weird couple, but hey. Gabriel wasn’t one to judge for lifestyle choices.

As he watched, the man’s tired face lifted in an attempted smile. “Can you sit up?” He asked curiously, edging closer. The woman looked slightly put-out that he was moving away from her.

“Fuhk uff.” Gabriel groaned. He lifted a hand to cover his face—his hand was freezing compared to his head, and it felt nice. It felt really, really nice. He let out a garbled sigh of pleasure, and the pounding in his head eased slightly.

There was a quiet pause, some footsteps, and then he heard the cracking of knees again as Weirdo knelt down beside his head. A hand slipped under Gabriel’s shoulder, and then he was being nudged upwards. “Hey, can you, uh, sit up?”

Gabriel let himself be coerced into a sitting position, and he hunched over immediately to stave off the rising tide of _ow_ that was currently cresting in his brain. “Can yuu take a showrr?” He grumbled petulantly.

Weirdo chuckled. “If you can drink this whole thing, I’ll take a shower, alright?”

Gabriel accepted the cool glass of water on reflex, hand closing around it before he’d fully comprehended what he was being handed. He looked at it stupidly—the glass was cloudy and splotchy, but the water was clear and almost sparkled in the poor lighting. He lifted his head and narrowed his eyes suspiciously at Weirdo. Ditzy was nowhere to be seen. “Why.” He didn’t ask, he demanded. He wasn’t gonna drink something some weird guy handed to him in a dusty room after mysteriously becoming alive again. That was a good way to get yourself dead. Again.

Instead of replying to his question, Weird leaned back and thrust a hand into his bathrobe pocket, emerging with a half-full plastic container that rattled when he lifted it up to show Gabriel. “Advil.” He explained. “For your headache.”

Gabriel didn’t even bother with asking how Weirdo knew he had a headache—he just snatched the bottle of pills from Weirdo and set the water down to screw open the cap.

“Only take three,” Weirdo warned him. “I, ah, don’t know if it will make you sick if you take more.”

Gabriel knocked four of the little pills onto his palm, just to spite the guy.

It felt creepy, having some unwashed stranger watch you clinically as you drank a glass of water and downed some pills. But if that’s what got this dude’s rocks off… Gabriel wasn’t dead yet, so he had no room for complaining. He set the glass down next to him with a loud thump once he was done, surprised—he was still thirsty. He’d never been thirsty before. Why was he thirsty? And sore? Again with the unshakeable facts of the universe being shaken. Gabriel was getting a little tired of that.

“You’re thirsty because humans get thirsty.” Weirdo informed him gravely, picking the glass and the bottle of Advil back up. Ditzy appeared out of thin air (not literally, but she walked so quietly that it sure seemed like it) and flashed Gabriel another one of those creepily wide smiles before taking it upon herself to deliver the cup and the pills to whence they had come—which appeared to be the bright room. Upon further inspection, it was probably a kitchen.

“’M notta human, dummass.” Gabriel muttered sullenly. His head was starting to feel better. He still wanted that glass of water back, though.

Weirdo smiled like there was some big joke that Gabriel wasn’t in on. Which would be the definition of unjust, because Gabriel happened to practically be the god of big jokes. “Then why were you thirsty?”

Gabriel responded to that by hugging his legs and letting his head sink down until it was resting on his knees. That… Was a good question. And for fucks sake, why was he so sore? His shoulders ached, his shoulders ach— _his shoulders ached._ Experimentally, he flexed his arms. Pain tore through his back and he bit his lip to stifle a cry of pain.

He felt a warm hand on his back, through the layers of his shirt, and the pain didn’t so much recede as vanished. Along with his headache.

Gabriel blinked and straightened, and faced the bedraggled man with seriousness. “Who are you?” He asked, slightly accusing—if this guy could heal like that, why hadn’t he taken Gabriel’s headache away in the first place?

The man shrugged. “Some people call me Chuck.”

…Okay, that answered _all_ of his questions, it really did. “..And?” Gabriel prompted. “ _What_ are you?”

Chuck smiled, a small smile with a hint of melancholy. “You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”

“What—“

Chuck stood up, and Ditzy was back at his side in a flash of teeth and pink and poorly highlighted hair. “This is Becky.” He introduced.

Becky beamed and waggled her fingers at Gabriel in an approximation of a wave. “You’ve been dead for a while.” She said in a disturbingly cheerful voice, as if announcing that she’d just bought two pounds of cookies.

“Uh, okay.” Was Gabriel’s articulate response to that. Because what else are you really going to say when the cliché of bubbly and overenthusiastic informs you how long you’ve been dead? He looked to Chuck for confirmation, since Chuck seemed to know what he was doing. At least, as much as a dirty guy in a bathrobe who smelled like whiskey could seem completely in control of everything around him. Which, honestly, wasn’t much and it wasn’t all that reassuring.

“About five years.” Chuck confirmed with a nod.

Wha—Gabriel shot to his feet in a slightly clumsy movement, his center of balance throwing him off slightly. Dust motes whizzed around his head as he looked back and forth between Chuck and Becky. “Five _years_? How can I be dead for _five years_ and not, oh, know anything about it?”

Chuck winced at the sudden angry tone Gabriel’s voice took, and Becky’s mouth narrowed into a thin line. “Gabri—“

“What even happened!? Michael, Lucifer, the apocalypse shindig? What happened?” The question burst out of him before he could stop it, and a knot clenched tight and sick in his stomach. He didn’t want to care about his brothers, or the apocalypse, or any of it.

But he’d died for it. He deserved to at least know what had happened.

Chuck’s defeated expression morphed into something that was… Unnervingly sly, after all of his downtrodden and serious expressions.

Gabriel felt himself take a step backwards. “Uh.”

“There’s a few people who can answer that question for you better than I.” Chuck said levelly. Becky’s smile was back, and she did the little kid wave with her fingers again.

All in all, it was mildly foreboding. Gabriel would have stepped back more, except his body was becomming heavy again, and his eyes were closing again, and the last thing he saw before they slipped shut completely were the dust motes eddying contentedly in the sourceless golden light as Chuck paced towards him.

There was a soft press of warm fingers against his forehead.

And then he was falling.


End file.
